The Columbia University Syndrome
*this article has been modified from the original version written in Japanese to accomodate non-Japanese audiences
1: Columbia becomes No.2 in the nation
September 2021, my Facebook and LinkedIn feeds were awfully noisy.
"Go Lions!" (aka Columbia University students) 🦁.
The USNews rankings placed Columbia second in the nation, just behind Princeton University. This news inevitably led to some friendly competition on social media, with many of my college friends sharing the accomplishment.
While these posts likely stemmed from school pride, they also unintentionally came across as boasting about their educational background.
I also felt my chest expanding with esteem, thinking that my alma mater got extra recognition from society, perhaps boosting my reputation.
2: Why I chose Columbia University
I think the "real" reasons I chose this very prestigious university in the first place were 1) my parents' academic inferiority complex that I internalized and 2) my own need for recognition. If I had wanted to attend a university in the city where the UN is located, which was my goal, I could have gone to New York University, for example. The above two points explain why I chose to go all the way to the Ivy League.
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My college choice, in retrospect, was hardly mine but rather generational.
My mother's only parent died suddenly of a heart attack when she was a freshman in college, so at the age of 19, she had to take over the mortgage on the house her mother had just built. My mother's father, a graduate of the University of Tokyo, had divorced when she was eight years old and had not been heard ever since, forcing her to drop out of college and work.
Although my mother was brilliant like her parents, she did not attend a famous university. Still, she would have liked to graduate from college. As if to erase the fact that she was a college dropout, she would repeat some unverifiable stories from her career every time she got drunk. She would flaunt her knowledge and scorn anyone who did not know what my mother considered "common sense," even if they were children. Nobody, including me, was safe from her harsh judgment.
My father had wanted to be a lawyer before he became a chef, but he failed entrance exams to Waseda University three times, according to my grandmother. After taking a detour to become a fisherman and a Buddhist monk, he worked in a French restaurant at a prestigious hotel. Unlike my mother, my father, who later experienced the world's vastness, no longer seemed bound by his educational background. At the subconscious level, however, "academics” may have cast a shadow as a mountain he could not climb. Sometimes, I saw instances where he would make fun of people with advanced academic backgrounds and high social status.
I, too, had an inferiority complex from an early age. I am the youngest of four siblings and was born a few years apart from my three older siblings, who were born consecutively. Because of this, the gap in growth between me and my older siblings, who were already in school, seemed very large. Furthermore, my second older sister was good at schoolwork, so my mother was happy, claiming that it was due to her intelligent genes and proper guidance.
My “smart” sister became the standard of comparison for my mother. “She was able to do that at your age, and you still can't!" Even if I placed in the top 20 out of 250 students in junior high school, she made sure to remind me of my sister, who was always number one and snickered at me, saying, "Oh well, you are mediocre."
With time, I unknowingly developed the habit of lying to my mother to make others' evaluations of me and my grades seem higher than they actually were. I would make up stories of praise even though I had not been praised, pretend that there were no exams if results were less than good, or that I was the only one who got a perfect score on a quiz even when everyone else also got perfect. She must have figured out I was lying, but I didn't miss my mother's grin when she believed them, even for a second.
After all, it wasn't very sensible because my official grades and class ranks were not as good as my sister's.
That was one of the reasons why I decided to pursue a music career, where I would not be compared to my smart sister. So when I returned to my "academic" path, I thought I was aiming for the heights of the "world" where I could not be compared to my sister or others by my mother. My parents' ecstatic excitement when I was accepted to Columbia made me feel that I had gained another level of academic achievement and simultaneously resolved their lifetime's worth of academic inferiority complex.
3: The Imposter Syndrome
However, the need for approval and lack of self-efficacy that I had developed over the years would not disappear the moment I entered my first-choice university. During my college years, I constantly suffered from the imposter syndrome. I just couldn't believe in my own abilities, and every time I took an exam, I felt like I was about to be exposed as someone who didn't belong there.
Even so, (or precisely because of it,) I studied hard every waking hour so that my "incompetence" would not be revealed at a university where I was surrounded by superbright geniuses and where excellence could not be faked.
Fortunately, I graduated with honors, double majoring in philosophy and sociology. So, the fact that the university I graduated from placed high in the rankings in 2021 satisfied my need for recognition.
4: Columbia's Lies and Truth
In February 2022, my social media feeds were awfully quiet despite the name “Columbia University” dancing across the news headlines.
Columbia math professors had accused the university of falsifying some of the data used in the rankings. Shortly thereafter, the university admitted to calculating the data using an outdated and incorrect method. The following year, Columbia University fell from second to 18th place, eventually announcing that it would no longer provide data for the rankings, following Yale and Harvard.
Indeed, this scandal can be explained from many perspectives and disciplines, including organizational studies, sociology, psychology, and even business.
But I understood this incident more with my heart than with my head and with emotion than with theory. A decade after graduation, I realized for the first time that I belonged to Columbia to the core. My alma mater was just like me back then, when I was lying to my mother about my accomplishments for her approval.
“Columbia! I understand you!!" I wanted to hug her, just like when Nietzsche held the overburdened horse on the icy road.
In my opinion, it was only natural for the establishment to suffer from what I call the "Columbia University Syndrome." It was constantly compared to its older, more prestigious siblings like Princeton, Yale, and Harvard. Small lies became habitual as it sought to belong to the family called “the Ivy League.” We were, after all, a group of like-minded people —desperate for approval and recognition. The imposter syndrome I thought I suffered in solitude might have been an institutional malaise. What an irony that the university where I went to satisfy my need for approval was the biggest "approval-hungry” ghost.
Meanwhile, however, the fact that the whistleblowers who exposed the scandal were insiders is also very typical of Columbia.
In fact, the university has many problems other than this scandal, such as institutional inequality and elitism, but it is a place that nurtured my ability to critically examine organizations and society while I belonged to it.
In my first year, I was a baby taking my first steps. In my second year, I was a child exploring the world. In my third year, I was a rebellious adolescent skeptical of the authority of the university and society. In my fourth year, I was a young adult forming my own opinion from a bird's-eye view. Through those different phases, Columbia allowed me to be myself and mature independently.
Falsifying data is wrong and should not be forgiven. However, Columbia has many excellent characteristics that cannot be quantified. That’s the truth. The university-wide enthusiasm for learning and the lifelong friends who alone were worth paying the high tuition fees for.
5: From superficial rankings to getting to know their personalities
We often see college consulting companies and high schools listing the world rankings of universities and their students’ university admission results. But what meaning does it have?
I think there is a hidden marketing message stirring anxiety.
Some of Japan's most prominent foundations for undergraduate study abroad have clearly stated that they will not finance students unless their university is ranked among the top 50 in the world.
But universities also have personalities. Just as children should not be evaluated only by deviation scores, we should focus more on the individuality of each university, not on superficial rankings. Those who choose universities to apply/ attend should also make an active effort to learn more about the character of each institution and how it was created and is managed without being caught up in rankings.
There are many universities worldwide where you can gain excellent skills, values, and connections even if they are not ranked. Those planning to study at university need to learn more about this and expand their options.
So in a way, my job is to help students find their values and choose universities based on what’s inside.
I sincerely hope that the Columbia alumni who were hiding amid the scandal that day, pretending to be outsiders, will be able to say, "Screw the rankings! Columbia has such good things to offer!” I also hope that students graduating from college will not be judged by companies or society based on superficial university rankings but rather by what kind of unique growth they have achieved at their respective institutions of study.
End
The Japanese version of this article is below:
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